18 de novembro de 2012

Every year major statistics are released that give us an idea on e-reader adoption and people’s reading habits. Ever since they started being sold at major retailers and bookstores, people have experienced buyer’s remorse. According to a study published yesterday, 35% of owners admitted that they have only used their e-reader device once since purchasing the item while 37% admit that their e-reader wasn’t a smart buy.

The returnability of books is a cancer that has been consuming the publishing industry for decades. Publisher after publisher has succumbed to its relentless arithmetic. Yet, book people cling to the belief that they are not vulnerable to the forces that destroyed their predecessors. In all the commentary about the merger of Random House and Penguin I have seen nothing written about the consignment model of bookselling that has doomed countless publishers over the past fifty years.The merger offers the captains of those great companies an opportunity to change that model. If they are sincere about leveling the playing field against Amazon, the abandonment of a returns-driven business model may be the only way to do so. I have no illusions that that will happen, but I feel it incumbent on me to remind my industry colleagues of why the field is tilted against them.

The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., the global multi-brand and multi-platform media and direct marketing company, today announced the launch of its new Reader’s Digest Books section on the iBookstore. The launch establishes a single location for consumers to easily find digital books published by The Reader’s Digest Association (RDA) at iTunes.com/ReadersDigestBooks.

I am always a bit skeptical about consumer surveys, because they paint too rosy a picture. Consumers are more likely to state that they might buy something at a certain price when asked versus when they have to part with cold, hard cash.Thus given that such surveys are overly optimistic, a recent UK survey pours bucket loads of ice-cold water on the economic attractiveness of ebook subscription services for publishers.

Kiev-based ereader manufacturer Pocketbook has just announced that they plan to make the world’s only ereader with a lighted color E-ink screen. The new new ereader will have an 8″ screen with a resolution of 800×600, a capacitive touchscreen, and Wifi. It’s not clear yet what the rest of the specs are, but this ereader will likely have a card slot, internal storage, and I’m betting it will also have Bluetooth.There’s no price mentioned in today’s announcement, but Pocketbook has said that the new ereader, which I am calling the Pocketbook Color, is going to hit the market in June 2013.

e-Readers have experienced diminished market share due to the rise of lower priced tablets. One of the big draws of electronic book readers is that you can read for months at a time, and its easier on the eyes then your average LCD tablet. This year it is expected that over 4.5 million readers are going to be shipped out in Q4, with Amazon being the largest vendor.

The results of a new survey sponsored by OverDrive with the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) reaffirm what librarians already know: libraries play a key role in reader’s book-buying decisions.Conducted in June and July of this year at thousands of OverDrive-powered public library websites in the United States, the poll found that patrons purchase an average of 3.2 books (both print and e-books) each month, and a majority would consider purchasing books discovered on a library website.

Citing the growth in popularity of the EPub format and a decline in demand for other e-book formats, Barnes & Noble is shutting down its Fictionwise.com e-book retailing site and its affiliated sites effective December 4. Originally founded by Scott and Stephen Pendergast in 2001, the former independent e-book retailer was sold to B&N in 2009.

The Hachette Book Group plans to launch an EPub3 program and will begin by releasing 16 titles in the format, an interactivity and multimedia-focused standard for enhanced e-books, between November 2012 and March 2013. The release marks Hachette’s commitment to the format and the house also plans to release all of its standard prose novels in EPub3 by March 2013.

At the end of June, Amazon’s Kindle family of reading devices was used to read e-books by 55% of e-book buyers, according to figures compiled by Bowker Market Research.Amazon’s share was up from 45% in the second quarter of 2010 and 48% in the second period of 2011, and the increase was aided by the release of the Kindle Fire. Since its introduction in late 2011, the Fire’s share of e-book reading has risen quickly and hit 18% in June. Some of its gains came at the expense of other Kindle devices, but the combination of dedicated e-readers and tablets gave Amazon its highest market share ever, topping the 49% the company had in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Colleges share many things on Twitter, but one topic can be risky to broach: the reading habits of library patrons.Harvard librarians learned that lesson when they set up Twitter feeds broadcasting titles of books being checked out from campus libraries. It seemed harmless enough—a typical tweet read, "Reconstructing American Law by Bruce A. Ackerman," with a link to the book's library catalog entry—but the social-media experiment turned out to be more provocative than library staffers imagined.Harvard suspended the practice after privacy concerns were raised. Even though the Twitter stream randomized checkout times and did not disclose patrons' identities, the worry was that someone might somehow use other details to identify the borrowers.